Rodents

As some of you may be aware, we have been battling with an ongoing mouse/rat problem. I say "mouse/rat" because our current theory is that we have both. They live in our ceiling and frequently come down to eat anything and everything they can find, regardless of whether it even vaguely resembles food. In addition getting into a wide range of food, to-date, they have chewed/eaten the following surprising non-food items:

-Lotion
-Hand sanitizer
-Anti-fungal creme
-Countless ziplock bags (with and without anything inside)
-Plastic container
-Toothbrush
-Candles
-Two kinds of bar soap
-The edge of the silicon cover for our computer keyboard
-Canvas backpack

While destroying things is our main frustration, they also leave poop all over our house and are extremely noisy at night. We have tried two different kinds of traps with several different kinds of bait and glue traps, none of which have been successful. We don't want to poison them because then they will die up in our ceiling and smell (and Gambians tell us it isn't particularly effective long-term). We reinforced all our doors and windows with a metal mesh that the mice/rats can't chew through the way they chew through plastic mosquito netting and duct tape patches. Unfortunately, they still can get into our ceiling easily from outside from a variety of entry points around the roof, and from there, they can easily jump down into our house (the rice bags don't seal tightly against the walls). Our next strategy is to try to convince Peace Corps that our rodent situation is a hazard to our health, and therefore they should replace our rice bag ceiling with a tightly sealed wooden ceiling to prevent our critter friends from getting down from the ceiling into our house. We'll see how this works. Stay posted for further developments. Oh Africa...